Centre for Formal Design and Verification of Software

Computational Systems, be it software or hardware, are becoming pervasive in every aspects of human life, from day to day household appliances, banking and trading sectors, aircraft control to mission critical satellite launchers. The quality of these systems have a direct bearing on the quality of human life. Many of these applications are quite complex making the development of high quality software or hardware for these applications, a very challenging activity. Some of these applications like computer based control systems used in nuclear reactors, space, avionics, process-control and robotics are safety-critical in the sense that failure could lead to financial or human catastrophes. Dramatic examples of consequences of even minor bugs in such applications are many; Ariane 5 failure, Mars Path finder problem and Pentium bug are some such examples.